[MaulingMonkey]

> Eh.. Game studios aren't generally still in the dark ages, are they? Physical disks went the way of the dodo.

I wish! Turns out enough of the world still has terrible enough internet for sneakernet to still have it's advantages. It's not the game studios that are in the dark ages ;)

> Every game now basically requires updates on first use, right?

Sadly. It's a pretty terrible experience. Ideally it's a small optional patch, or maybe only required for online play - but your ability to do that depends in part on how bad the bugs are without it. The ability to do day one patches doesn't translate into a rubber stamp either - it's easier to get a waiver on a few heisenbugs than a truckload. And this is in the "okay okay, we'll backpedal on requiring our console to be always online" world of console dev - I imagine mandatory day 1 patches are even worse on handhelds.

And if you don't want that day 1 patch to introduce more bugs than it fixes (souring your launch, reviews, and ultimately sales) - or a release delay messing up your marketing plans (to potentially similar effect and/or extra costs) - you still need as stable a build as you can get by some hard cutoff X, so you're back to having a release branch, freezing master, or some combination thereof.